Shawna Atteberry

After my 30-page week, I wrote 18 pages last week on my novel. Not as many, but I introduced a new character and had to develop her. I also had to remember something I read in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

Growth is an erratic movement: two steps forward, one step back. . . . You are capable of great things on Tuesday, but on Wednesday you may slide back. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. . . . Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness.

At times like this Cameron says that we need to be kind to ourselves. She says one of the biggest mistakes artists of any stripe make is that we are too hard on ourselves. We are never going to get anywhere if all we are going to do is beat ourselves up. Our inner artist does not like that and hides. Well wouldn’t you, if someone beat up on you all the time? I am on week nine now and something she said really struck me:

Enthusisam (from the Greek “filled with God”) is an ongoing energy supply tapped nto the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all play mates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond.

True our artist may rise at dawn to greet the typewriter or easel in the morning stillness but this event has more to do with a child’s love of secret adventure than with ironclad discipline. What other people may view as discipline is actually a play date that we make with our artist child: “I’ll meet you at 6:00 a.m. and we’ll goof around with a script, painting, sculpture . . .”

Our artist child can best be enticed to work by treating work as play. Paint is great gooey stuff. Sixty sharp pencils are fun. Many writers eschew a computer for the comforting, companionable clatter for a solid typewriter that trots along like a pony. In order to work well, many artists find that their work spaces are best dealt with a play spaces.

It hit me why this last year had been so hard for me: I was so hard on myself. I was treating my artist like a soldier. We have to do this! We have to do that! Good night, no wonder I had no creativity and had absolutely no idea what to write. It’s now totally changing as I look at my writing as something I can play with and have fun with. I can say to my inner artist: Hey you want to see what Kathryn is up to today? You want to see what kind of trouble she gets into? And my inner artist perks up. She’s interested in that, instead of me saying, “We have to do this and that”, and “This what it means to be a professional writer” like some self-destructive drill sergeant.

It is so foreign from what the world the tells us: we have to be tough on ourselves to get ahead and get what we want. We have to have our nose to the grindstone and go, go, go. There must be production; there must be results. But creativity does not work that way. Creativity needs to be nurtured and given space. The inner artist needs a play area not a 10 mile hike. I’ve noticed as I have started being nicer to myself (and my inner artist) that more ideas are coming. That writing is easier. That it’s okay if I’m not that productive one day because there’s tomorrow, and who knows what me and my inner artist will find to get into and play with tomorrow?

I spent part of this last week in Kansas City getting my house ready to put on the market. It is now for sale, and I am really hoping it will sell by the end of the summer. I have a much better realtor this time around, so I am hopeful.

The Printers Row Book Fair was this weekend (it’s a whole two blocks from where we live). I finally got to meet some people from the Chicago Writers Association that I knew only through email. I met Lynn and bought her book, Excited Light. I also bought a few other books: a mystery by another Chicago writer J. A. Konrath’s Rusty Nail, along with Chef’s Healthy Desserts, Myths and Motifs in Literature, and Drawing: The Complete Course. One of the things I want to do is draw and paint, so it’s time to get a little instruction on it.

I have decided to start editing Career Women of the Bible into a book format and get a book proposal worked up. If you have any suggestions to make the series more readable, please let me know in the comments or via email (see contact page). I know it is still very much on the scholary side and needs a lot of rewriting. I also want to put more narrative in, so the pieces read more like a story than a term paper.

I have just finished the book proposal for the Spiritual Direction 101 book. Yeah! The Hubby is going to look over it tonight, and tomorrow I send it to the director of Beacon Hill Books! I am so happy.

But don’t look for my posting to increase. My parents are coming in Wednesday and will be here for a week. So I won’t resume regular posting until after May 23.

Aaah, accomplishment. What a great way to start the week.

The book proposal is taking up most of my time right now. But I am reading some good stuff both for that project, and in the book I’m using for my devotions: Disciplines for the Inner Life (see the What I’m Reading Page). For the rest of this week I thought I would share quotes that popped out at me and made me think. The first is from one of my favorite authors, Madeline L’Engle.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. the strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation. The great tragedians have always understood this, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. We witness it in history in such people as Tiberius, Eva Peron, Hitler.

I was timid about putting forth most of these thoughts, but this kind of timidity is itself a form of pride. The moment that humiluty becomes self-consciousness, it becomes hubris. One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time. Therefore, the art of creating—painting a picture, singing a song, writing a story—is a humble act? This is a new thought to me. Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

So what are you reading? What’s making you stop and think?

I just heard back from Beacon Hill Books (which is the Church of the Nazarene’s publishing house), and the editor Bonnie wants me to submit 2—3 sample chapters, an outline, and a table of contents on a book about spiritual direction. Woot! I guess we know what I will be doing for the next couple of weeks.

Yes, this week is Book in a Week, and I am working on the novel. It’s coming along and my plot is developing. I didn’t get as much done yet today because my Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, came in, and I was paging through that. They made so many needed updates. It’s wonderful! Yes, I’m a geek.

Okay back to my urban fantasy.